In this rich history of female seasonal workers in the Veracruz coffee industry, Heather Fowler-Salamini balances local and transnational business, economic, and labor history. The study contributes to our understanding of why certain sectors of the workforce succeed or not in pressing workplace demands in given historical moments, the nature of political power in Mexico, and how these are based in women's work and in community, social, and political engagement.

Fowler-Salamini enters into and diverges from several important arguments about the cohesiveness and mobilization of labor. Charles Bergquist argued that workers were most likely to succeed when employed in industries strategic to the state and national development, especially when tied to exports. Those industries tended to be male dominated — oil, ports, and steel, for example — and would not have included seasonal workers employed in what for 1920s Mexico was a...